n the entanglements of
life; no intimation of the immense force of the emotional side of life;
no intimation here of the immense part which sheer selfishness plays.
Mrs. Eddy's sin is far too simple. There is, once more, a sound reason
for that. Mrs. Eddy is twice-born, if you will, but the struggle from
which she finally emerged with whatever measure of victory she attained
was not fought out with conscience as the field of battle, or in the
final reconciliation of a divided self finding unity and peace on some
high level.

If Mrs. Eddy's true struggle was of the soul and not of complaining
nerves she has left no record of it anywhere. It was rather the reaction
of a speculative mind against the New England theology. Her experience
is strangely remote from the experience of Saul of Tarsus, or Augustine,
or John Bunyan. This is not to deny that in the practical outcome of
Christian Science as evidenced in the life of its adherents there is not
a very real power of helpful moral adjustment, but the secret of that
must be sought in something else than either its philosophy or its
theology. Christian theologians themselves have been by no means agreed
as to what sin really is. Under their touch it became too often a
theological abstraction rather than entanglement of personality caught
in manifold urgencies and pulled this way and that by competing forces
battling in the will and flaming in passion and desire. But a sin which
has no reality save through a mistaken belief in its existence is
certainly as far from the fact of a world like ours as is a sin which is
only one factor in a scheme of redemption.

But at any rate, if sin have no reality except our mistaken persuasion
that it be true and if we are delivered from it directly we cease to
believe in it and affirm in the stead of it the reality of love and
goodness, then while there may be in such a faith as this both the need
and possibility of the recasting of our personal lives, there is in it
neither need nor possibility of the Christian doctrine of the atonement.
Naturally since man is incapable of sin, sickness and death, he is
unfallen, nor is "his capacity or freedom to sin any part of the divine
plan." "A mortal sinner is not God's man. Mortals are the counterfeits
of immortals; they are the children of the wicked one, or the one evil
which declares that man begins in dust or as a material embryo" (page
475).

Here also is an echo from an early time and a fa